The nuclear family more myth than reality: Expert

Shannon Proudfoot, Postmedia News10.05.2010

Clarence Lochhead, executive director of the Vanier Institute of the Family, talks about his organization's upcoming report entitled "Families Count," from his offices in Ottawa on Tuesday, Sept.28, 2010. The institute's main focus is on the importance and strengths of families in Canada and challenges they face.David Kawai
/ Postmedia News

Clarence Lochhead, executive director of the Vanier Institute of the Family, talks about his organization's upcoming report entitled "Families Count," from his offices in Ottawa on Tuesday, Sept.28, 2010. The institute's main focus is on the importance and strengths of families in Canada and challenges they face.David Kawai
/ Postmedia News

Clarence Lochhead, executive director of the Vanier Institute of the Family, talks about his organization's upcoming report entitled "Families Count," from his offices in Ottawa on Tuesday, Sept.28, 2010. The institute's main focus is on the importance and strengths of families in Canada and challenges they face.David Kawai
/ Postmedia News

Clarence Lochhead, executive director of the Vanier Institute of the Family, talks about his organization's upcoming report entitled "Families Count," from his offices in Ottawa on Tuesday, Sept.28, 2010. The institute's main focus is on the importance and strengths of families in Canada and challenges they face.David Kawai
/ Postmedia News

Clarence Lochhead, executive director of the Vanier Institute of the Family, talks about his organization's upcoming report entitled "Families Count," from his offices at 94 Centrepointe Dr. in Ottawa on Tuesday, September 28, 2010. The institute's main focus is on the importance and strengths of families in Canada and challenges they face.David Kawai
/ Postmedia News

The postwar nuclear family headed by a breadwinning man and homemaker wife that's become the "traditional" measuring stick against which today's families are judged is more mythical ideal than bygone reality, says Stephanie Coontz, a professor of history and family studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.

Through most of history, the whole family — including the children — worked to support the family, she says, and it wasn't until the 1920s that large numbers of men started earning wages working for other people, children went to school instead of work and women took over the domestic sphere. That model receded during the Great Depression and the Second World War, then came "roaring back" in the postwar era, Coontz says, but it was the norm only for one brief moment of human history.

"A big myth is the idea that male providing was the traditional family," she says. "Women were co-providers throughout most of history."

That postwar model became an emblem of family life in part because it coincided with an economic boom time when real wages were rising and inequality was shrinking, she says.

"We look back at the prosperity and compare it with the stagnation that we have today, and it's easy to say, 'Well, it was the families that made that work,' but in fact it was that economic prosperity that allowed those families," Coontz says.

The 1950s nuclear family was immortalized in popular culture just as television was influencing its first mass audiences, she says, and there was a "huge cultural push" everywhere from psychiatry to women's magazines to declare the breadwinner-homemaker model the perfect form and women with other desires defective in some way.

And while real people may still feel inadequate when comparing their imperfect lives and families to the idealized versions on TV, in magazines and advertisements, there seems to be more room now for realistic portrayals of family life.

"Popular culture is getting a little better about that, because side by side with the glowing commercials with sentiment just dripping off every frame, you are getting things like Modern Family that show that there are all sorts of conflicts and irritations, and yet there is some real love," Coontz says.

But Clarence Lochhead, executive director of the Vanier Institute of the Family, says the unprecedented diversity in the structure of today's families presents "huge challenges" not only for his organization but for governments and society at large: how do you create "family-friendly" workplace policies, for example, when it's nearly impossible to set clear parameters on what constitutes a family?

"If our only concern was what families look like and not what they do, we'd miss a whole heck of a lot of families," he says. "The only policies we would be concerned about then would be those that encouraged families to look a certain way."

***

Join reporter Shannon Proudfoot and Clarence Lochhead, executive director of the Vanier Institute of the Family, on Thursday Oct. 7 at noon ET for a live chat about the evolving meaning of family in Canada.

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